World of Warcraft Patch 4.0.6 - Death Knights

A new patch came out today and I thought it would be interesting to look at the changes that will affect the way I play the game as a primarily tanking Death Knight.

- Death Coil damage reduced by 10% - I only ever cast this on Magmaw/Cho'gall to try to proc runic empowerment. Won't change the way I play or affect my performance in any meaningful way.
- Icebound Fortitude now breaks stuns when used - Awesome for pvp, will allow me to interrupt on Halfus during roars once. Not much of a change.
- Necrotic Strike nerfed for resilience and debuff duration. Pretty irrelevant since I never have to apply the cats slow debuff.
- 9% free spell hit - Awesome all around. Works to remove one of my two interrupting obstacles which will increase the number of fights I can reasonably tank properly. Mediocre threat increase, too, not that that matters.
- Bone shield gains a charge - I really need to cast this more often. This just makes it better, maybe that will be enough to force me to use it.
- Crimson scourge redesigned. - Pretty sure it was wrong to have this talent before the patch (after I learned to use Outbreak properly it went down in value) but at least I was casting Blood Boil in my rotation to maintain debuffs. Now I won't cast it except on AE phases so it's probably right to dump it.
- Heart Strike damage buff - This makes up a non-insignificant amount of my damage and is a strict buff. I won't hit the button more often because of the buff but I can't complain. (And I will hit the button more often now what with not casting Blood Boil.)
- Death Strike damage buff - This should make Death Strike my biggest damage ability instead of Rune Strike. Now if only I could find a way to hit it more often too...
- Blood Shield buff - Blood Shield now stacks, so when I hit Death Strike twice in a row I'm not being stupid anymore. Yay changes which make up for being terrible! (Though now it may not even be terrible to hit it twice in close succession, since I can 'roll' the shield forward. Theoretically this would let me eat a double strike on Chimaeron and then completely absorb his next melee attack if I happen to pull aggro from the 120k healing, for example.)
- Scarlet Fever change - This is my 10% ap debuff and it now comes from my unholy disease instead of from Blood Boil. I maintained both diseases anyway, so this is just a buff for me. I no longer need to cast stupid Blood Boil. Does mean on AE fights I need to spread diseases ASAP instead of just hitting Blood Boil for half of my debuffs and dealing with the other one as I felt like it.
- Will of the Necropolis change - no longer resets a blood rune, instead makes Rune Tap free. I like this change since if I don't feel like Rune Tapping I don't get put further from Blade Barrier. Hopefully it will also make the ability glow shiny so I think to use it more often.
- Chilblains makes Chains of Ice into a root - I like this though I never cast Chains of Ice anyway.
- Howling Blast does 40% less damage to secondary targets - This is a huge one. I'm on add killing duty on both Magmaw and Cho'gall and this substantially impacts my ability to do those jobs. Well, on Magmaw it doesn't really matter. I was able to do it in ungemmed, unenchanted greens. I could do my job on this fight if they have 5 billion health. It's a little trickier to pick up a new group when there's an old group alive but it's just tricky, not hard. Cho'gall on the other hand the adds can't be kited around forever. They have to die ASAP and thus far it's been predominantly Howling Blast killing them. The rest of our DPS will need to pick up the slack here or we won't be able to win anymore.
- Hungering Cold nerfed in PvP - only a PvP nerf.
- Might of the Frozen Wastes change - 12% more melee damage when using a 2-hander is a huge buff. About 2/3rds of my single target damage seems to come from melee sources, so this is almost an 8% damage buff. Cho'gall's adds may be getting harder but phase 3 will get a little easier when I'm doing 8% more than I used to.
- Blightcaller redesign - I'm never unholy but it's good that mastery won't suck anymore since all my gear for both specs is loaded with mastery.
- Dark Transformation nerf - I'm never unholy but it sucks.
- Death's Advance added - Unholy can't be slowed in PvP anymore. This seems overpowered. Maybe I will be unholy some of the time now.
- Desecration buffed - PvP relevant only.
- Magic Suppression nerfed - Supposedly raiding DKs only wanted to put 1/3 talents here because the runic power was infinite at that point. I guess now you may need to put 2/3 or 3/3?
- Rage of Rivendare nerfed - I'm never unholy but it sucks.
- Runic Corruption buffed - This only really helps people who don't maintain a proper priority system and end up dumping all their runic power in chunks. That's what I tend to do, so yay!
- Shadow Infusion nerfed - I'm never unholy but it sucks.
- Sudden Doom nerfed - They never intended for dual-wield unholy to be a spec and this is what was really propping it up. Good-bye dual-wield unholy. Good-bye.
- Unholy Might nerfed - I'm never unholy but it sucks.
- Virulence redesigned - They rolled the old Virulence into just being a DK. Now it makes diseases do 30% more damage. Diseases were 13.5% of my damage on Al'Akir as frost DPS, so taking this would be an overall 4% damage buff for 3 talent points. I probably want that. For tanking, diseases were 13.3% of my damage but less of my threat since they don't have a bonus multiplier. If I need to take talents to just do more damage I'll look into it, but I don't have threat issues so I may find something else to take instead.
- Glyph of Dark Succor added - Irrelevant for tanking and unlikely to find a use while DPSing.
- Glyph of Death's Embrace nerfed - I use this in PvP and was considering going for Lichborne in my tanking spec for more healing. Now it's less more healing, so maybe not.
- Runeforge buffs - Disarm effects increased, but I don't use those runes so I don't care.
- Misc bug fixes - Whatever.


Unholy got kicked in the junk, especially dual-wield unholy. If one had faith in Blizzard's ability to get numbers right then one could assume the Unholy mastery change will off-set the various nerfs to all sources of damage for unholy but I don't have any such faith.

Frost is likely in a better place now. More single target damage and less AE damage is what the spec actually needed for PvE. My only concern is they didn't nerf Howling Blast enough and I'm still going to have to respec for add based fights.

Blood just got better. Damage buffs and quality of life buffs without a single nerf. I like it.

Glyph of Vampiric Blood

I've read in several places that this is actually a good tanking glyph. My gut feeling has been that I wouldn't use it even if it didn't occupy a glyph slot but I haven't actually looked at what it does.

Unglyphed Vampiric Blood increases healing taken by 25% and gives a last stand ability for 15% of my maximum health. These effects last for 10 seconds and the ability has a 60 second cooldown. Typically I use it if I unexpectedly dip low. Frequently I also hit Rune Tap at the same time. Sometimes I just use it as a 'tanking cooldown' on high damage aspects of a fight when Icebound Fortitude is on cooldown.

Glyphed Vampiric Blood increases healing taken by 40% and has no other effect. It lasts the same amount of time and has the same cooldown.

So, what does that actually do? If I chain it with Rune Tap then unglyphed I immediately get .15 of my max health plus 1.25*1.15*.1 of my max health for an immediate heal of .29375 of my max health. If I chain it with Rune Tap glyphed then I get 1.4*.1 of my max health for an immediate heal of .14 of my max health. So right off the top I'm worse off, but eventually I'll be better off. After X raw healing with Y raw max health I'll be at either 1.25*X+.29375*Y or 1.4*X+.14*Y. The equilibrium point is when X = 1.025*Y. Or, after I've been more than healed to full. So after I've been healed to full any extra healing comes at a discount for the healers (or if it's steady huge damage the extra healing percentage could theoretically keep me standing).

Without rune tap the math is even simpler. 1.25*X + .15*Y compared to 1.4*X. This reaches equilibrium when I've been healed for my max health.

No matter why I'm hitting the button, if I end up at max health I'm going to be satisfied. Unglyphed is strictly superior until I get that much healing poured into me. Glyphed could only makes sense if I never get topped up to full but need healing for way more than my max health in 10 seconds and a 25% boost to healing isn't good enough. (Or this happens every minute and the healers barely run out of mana?) I just can't see it ever being useful.

I feel vindicated.

Blood Worms

I haven't actually built a tanking spec yet for level 85. I had a rough one at level 80 and then got tapped to tank some dungeons at level 84. I had 4 talent points to spend at that point and figured I'd just throw them anyplace and go rather than think about it. Those places were Scent of Blood for more Rune Strikes and Blood Parasite because pets are cool. I figure I'll build a real spec soon, but part of that is figuring out what the different talents actually do. What are these blood worms and what are they doing? I went to the log of our first raid and went into the section for the Argaloth kill. This isn't a perfect fight to work things out on but it's the best I've got.

It seems I spawn a blood worm every 15 seconds or so when I'm actually fighting. 12 of the 13 blood worms actually killed themselves to pop a heal and the 13th was alive when the fight ended. When a worm exploded it healed everyone nearby for 1666 times the number of buff stacks it had. On average it had 7.25 stacks on explosion, so it was healing over 12k to everyone nearby on average. A 12k AE heal every 15 seconds feels good. I try to hit rune tap on cooldown when anyone in my party is damaged and it's only a 6k heal every 30 seconds.

Now, rune tap has the advantage of being on demand, no range restrictions, and healing me personally for more like 16k when I hit it so I like it more but it seems in a world where healers are willing to leave people at not-full the blood worms will pump out an awful lot of extra healing to those nearby.

Which is the main problem with bloodworms. Who exactly is 'nearby'? On Argaloth the answer was hardly ever me. Our rogue and the hunter pet were nearby almost every time. Sometimes it also hit people in the other tank group. (Especially Byung for some reason... I guess maybe he was standing on the melee side of the other group? Elemental shamen are melee units, after all...) Overall for the fight they only did 2.28% but that's completely mana free healing and feels ok.

On top of that they do damage as well. Unfortunately they don't do very much of it. They were only 0.28% of our damage on the fight. They swung for only about 630 damage a swing and tend to die after 7 or so swings. It's not nothing, but it's not exactly something either.

If there were fights where the heal actually hit me as the tank I think they'd be very solid. Unfortunately we also threw some attempts at the Conclave of Wind encounter and bloodworms healed me for 84 across the entire night. They actually did a substantial amount of healing on our ret paladin who was fighting my mob, doing 105k healing or 16.6% of the total healing he took over those attempts.

I think they probably need a design change to be a reasonable option. They either need a much larger radius so they'll heal the tank no matter how big the boss is, or they need to melee from the front without providing parry haste, or they need to make the heal always hit the DK who made them along with the people in melee range. They're just not consistent enough to build a positional strategy around and if they aren't healing a few people or a tank they're not powerful enough to justify 2 talent points. I'm not sure what I could take that's better though. 2% spell hit probably.